Old Gods Almost Dead

The acclaimed, bestselling rock-and-roll biographer delivers the first complete, unexpurgated history of the world's greatest band.

The saga of the Rolling Stones is the central epicin rock mythology. From their debut as the intermission band at London's Marquee Club in 1962 through their latest record-setting "Bridges to Babylon" world tour, the Rolling Stoneshave defined a musical genre and experienced godlike adulation, quarrels, addiction, legal traumas, and descents into madness and death_while steadfastly refusing to fade away. Now Stephen Davis, the "New YorkTimes "bestselling author of "Hammer of the Gods" and "Walk This Way," who has followed the Stones for three decades, presents their whole story, replete with vivid details of theStones' musical successes_and personal excesses.

Born into the wartime England of air-raid sirens, bombing raids, and strict rationing, the Rolling Stones came of age in the 1950s, as Americanblues and pop arrived in Europe. Among London's most ardent blues fans in the early 1960s was a short blond teenage guitar player named Brian Jones, who hooked up with a lorry driver's only son, Charlie Watts, a jazz drummer. At the same time, popular and studious Michael Philip Jagger-who, as a boy, bawled out a phonetic version of "La Bamba" with an eye-popping intensity thatscared his parents-began sharing blues records with a primary school classmate, Keith "Ricky" Richards, a shy underachiever, whose idol was Chuck Berry. In 1962 the four young men, joined byBill Perks (later Wyman) on bass, formed a band rhythm and blues band, which Brian Jones named the "the Rollin' Stones" in honor of the Muddy Waters blues classic.

Usingthe biography of the Rolling Stones as a narrative spine, "Old God Almost Dead" builds a new, multilayered version of the Stones' story, locating the band beyond the musical world they dominatedand showing how they influenced, and were influenced by, the other artistic movements of their era: the blues revival, Swinging London, the Beats, Bob Dylan's Stones-inspired shift from protest to pop, Pop Artand Andy Warhol's New York, the "Underground" politics of the 1960s, Moroccan energy and European orientalism, Jamaican reggae, the Glam and Punk subcultures, and the technologic advances ofthe video and digital revolution. At the same time, "Old Gods Almost Dead "documents the intense backstage lives of the Stones: the feuds, the drugs, the marriages, and the affairs that inspired andinformed their songs; and the business of making records and putting on shows.

The first new biography of the Rolling Stones since the early 1980s, "Old Gods Almost Dead" is the mostcomprehensive book to date, and one of the few to cover all the band's members. Illustrated throughout with photos of pivotal moments, it is a celebration of the Rolling Stones as an often courageous, oftenfoolish gang of artists who not only showed us new worlds, but new ways of living in them. It is a saga as raunchily, vibrantly entertaining as the Stones themselves. "From theHardcover edition."